SDN with Red Hat OpenStack Platform: OpenDaylight Integration

OpenDaylight is an open source project under the Linux Foundation with the goal of furthering the adoption and innovation of software-defined networking (SDN) through the creation of a common industry supported platform. Red Hat is a Platinum Founding member of OpenDaylight and part of the community alongside a list of participants that covers the gamut  from individual contributors to large network companies, making it a powerful and innovative engine that can cover many use-cases.

Starting with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, Red Hat is bundling a limited distribution of OpenDaylight that is co-engineered with Red Hat OpenStack, and offered as a Technology Preview. It combines carefully selected OpenDaylight components that designed to help you set up a lean and stable OpenDaylight solution as a networking backend for your Red Hat OpenStack Platform environment. The key OpenDaylight project used in the Red Hat solution is NetVirt. NetVirt is a Network Virtualization application developed on OpenDaylight consisting of modular sub-services such as L2, L3, ACL, NAT, DHCP, IPv6 control, and more. It currently supports the OpenStack Neutron API and controls Open vSwitch (OVS) instances by leveraging OpenFlow and OVSDB.

It’s important to highlight that neither OpenDaylight nor NetVirt are replacements for OpenStack Neutron. As the main OpenStack Networking API, Neutron is where the networking abstractions are defined. OpenDaylight consumes the Neutron API, it does not replace or change it. Furthermore, all communication between OpenDaylight and OpenStack are done only over public, well known, REST APIs.

With the release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, we are happy to share that we have updated our OpenDaylight offering. While the solution remains in a Technology Preview support state, it includes major improvements that should make it easier to setup and try, and it’s based on thoroughly engineered and tested packages. Some highlights of this release include:

• Updated OpenDaylight Neutron plug-in for OpenStack (networking-odl), based on the upstream Newton release.
• Updated OpenDaylight package, based on the upstream Boron SR2 release and featuring the new NetVirt service (odl-netvirt-openstack), with a more modular architecture and a greater feature set.
• New tight integration with the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director for orchestrated installation and management. OpenDaylight can run together with the OpenStack overcloud controller role, or as a separate custom role on a different node.
• New supportive documentation to help you get started. We have a Product Guide and an Installation and Configuration Guide available as part of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform documentation suite.

While NetVirt is the only OpenDaylight application currently offered by Red Hat, we are actively working  to extend the platform, onboard new applications, and cover more use-cases based on the feedback we receive from our customers, partners, and field teams. Have a question or suggestion for improving our OpenDaylight offering? Feel free to reach out to the Red Hat OpenDaylight team by sending an e-mail to opendaylight-feedback@redhat.com.